hammercloth

English[edit]

Probably from Dutch hemel (“heaven, canopy, tester”) (akin to German Himmel, and perhaps also to English heaven) + cloth; or perhaps a corruption of hamper cloth.

hammercloth (plural hammercloths)

(archaic, historical) The cloth that covers a coachbox.
- 1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter XX, in Great Expectations […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC:
  Nevertheless, a hackney-coachman, who seemed to have as many capes to his greasy great-coat as he was years old, packed me up in his coach and hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier of steps, as if he were going to take me fifty miles. His getting on his box, which I remember to have been decorated with an old weather-stained pea-green hammercloth, moth-eaten into rags, was quite a work of time.
- 1898, Kate Douglas Wiggin, chapter 6, in Penelope’s Progress […], Boston, Mass., New York, N.Y.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company […], →OCLC:
  The mulberry-colored coach, apparently not too large for what it contained, though she alone was in it; the handsome, jolly coachman and his splendid hammer-cloth loaded with lace